IT would be hard to find anyone who has not heard or read jokes featuring the (absent-minded) professor.

With the possible exception of the mother-in-law (about whom more some other time), the most popular subject for subtle sophisticated humour remains the hapless ‘absent-minded professor’. Pick up a joke book – any joke book – and you are bound to find a good number of hilarious jokes featuring the dignified figure of the professor. These irrefutable facts would form the bedrock of this dissertation.

Be that as it may, one can hardly move forward without pausing to delve into the basic ques-tion: why does the subject of the absent-minded professor of all people particularly appeal to the wits? To put it another way: with a myriad other samples of the species to choose from, why pick on the hapless professor? Or then, one can pose the fundamental question: why the professor, when it could just as well have been a member of any other profession? Surely there are other professions that are just as much, if not more, joke-worthy and/or susceptible to the state of absent-mindedness? Why then zero in on the professor?

Having withstood this somewhat convoluted reasoning this far, the reader may well be justified in enquiring what gives one the right to make this matter one’s business.

Considering that the joke in question is apt and good enough to provoke honest laughter why, then, go into unnecessary and irrelevant........

© Pakistan Observer